Throughout my career in medicine, a central challenge has been connecting people—whether patients, families, trainees, or clinicians—to the right health information at the right time. Today at our annual healthcare event, The Check Up, we shared how AI is helping to make healthcare more useful, complex information more accessible, and clinician learning more impactful—all in collaboration with industry-leading partners.
Cooperation on rural health
Today, we announced efforts for a series of AI initiatives aimed at making healthcare more accessible. As part of this, we are exploring working with leaders in Arkansas, including the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine and the Heartland Whole Health Institute to help pioneer a model for rural health transformation.
We hope this work can serve as a blueprint for improving health outcomes nationally and globally by focusing on clinician training, care delivery and health research, while building on our existing investments and collaborations in rural health. Almost half of the world’s population lives in rural areas, contributing to the estimated 2 billion people in these regions who lack access to essential health services – more than twice as many as in urban areas.
Investment in clinician training
Having spent many years teaching at the bedside, I know that today’s trainees will be the first to practice in a world fundamentally reshaped by AI. That’s why Google.org is committing $10 million to fund organizations that will collaborate to reinvent clinician education in the AI era with the goal of improving quality, person-centered care. The Council of Medical Specialty Societies and the American Academy of Nursing are the first of several organizations that will support this work.
For us, it also means that we work to continuously improve products like Search, where people ask more than a billion health questions every day. And that means using artificial intelligence to make information more useful and reliable, including for the next generation of healthcare professionals.
On YouTube – where health-related videos have surpassed 1 trillion views globally – AI is creating new ways to support clinicians’ learning. On eligible health videos, an “Ask” button allows people to interact with information in a more personal way. A first-year medical student can, for example, ask to “explain this concept in simple terms” and instantly translate complex medical topics into accessible language that they can understand and share with their communities.
We are also experimenting with artificial intelligence as a brainstorming partner to organize peer-reviewed scientific information and suggest ways to present complex information to a broad audience.